Skylark (37 page)

“Why send him there?” I asked, staring at the pin until my eyes began to water, as if it might give me answers.

“Last I heard, though it’s information from several generations ago, the people there had been experimenting with restoration.”

“Restoration?”

“Trying to turn the world back to what it was. Before the wars. Setting free the magic trapped in the pockets.”

I struggled to speak past the lump in my throat, loud enough to be heard over the rising altercation outside. “Or taking it out of people.”

Dorian gazed back at me until a piercing scream had us both snapping our heads toward the window. I ran for the door, bursting through it and coming up against the railing and staring down through the gathering twilight.

A cluster of scouts was entering the village, manhandling—something. It was concealed by the press of their bodies, but I realized quickly who it must be.

Kris. They’d caught him, or else he’d come back.

I threw myself down the ladder so quickly I barely touched it. Once my feet hit the ground I sprinted for the cluster. As I drew closer, one of the scouts was flung back and I saw a flash of wild, pale eyes that brought me to a crashing halt.

“Stop!” I cried, shaking myself from my stupor and reaching for the nearest scout. “Stop it—I know this boy!”

The scout shook me off. I recognized him as Tansy’s friend Tomas. “Stay back, Lark, he’s dangerous!”

“He’s
not
!” I shouted, charging my way into the group.

I couldn’t blame them for thinking he was dangerous. As I broke into the ring of scouts he snarled, throwing one of them off with such force that the scout hit the ground and lay there, stunned. In a fluid motion, Oren snatched his knife out of his boot. The scouts lurched back as he carved a half-circle of deadly, glinting steel in the air.

I stood alone, forcing myself to remain still. “Oren! It’s me. Stop!”

The way he stared at me, blank and feral, reminded me of the way he’d looked that first day when I saw him in the house of the ghosts. Devoid of humanity. Wild. Hungry. His fingers twitched around the knife, a nervous shift of his grip. “Lark,” he said finally. He blinked away the wildness.

I could see Tomas standing beyond Oren’s shoulder. His expression was grave, his voice tightly controlled. “Lark, he’s dangerous. He sliced up one of my guys. You should—”

“He’s just not used to this many people,” I cut in angrily. “If you just let him calm down he’ll be fine.” He’d come here looking for me—why else would he have braved this place? And the scouts had treated him no better than the shadow monsters they so ruthlessly killed. “Oren, can you put the knife away?”

Oren’s eyes flickered from my face to the scouts in the circle beyond me, then back again. “I came here to get you,” he said. “Never should have let you—come on, let’s go.” He brandished the knife, the scouts scattering in a wave before him. The moonlight scattering from the blade cut a path through the crowd.

“But I’m fine,” I whispered. There was still a hint of that ferocity in his gaze. There was always a part of me that panicked when Oren was close, like a mouse that senses a cat. He was a part of that cutthroat world, and I wasn’t. “Look at me. I’m happy here. Just put the knife away and you’ll see.”

Another quick glance away from my face. He gave no sign of hesitation or indecision, not even a shift of his weight back and forth or an uneasy look.

Tomas caught my eye over Oren’s shoulder and nodded, making a rolling gesture with his hands.
Keep going.

“I promise,” I said, moving toward him. “They’ve been really great. Lots to eat and a place to sleep that’s not the ground. And protection, they keep the shadow people out. Just give me the knife.” I held out my hand, concentrating all my willpower on keeping it from shaking.

I saw Tomas frown, glance at one of the scouts next to him. I ignored him, focusing on Oren.

“This is a bad place—” he started.

“It isn’t.” I swallowed, continuing to move toward him. “Why would I tell you to put the knife away if it was dangerous here? Really, Oren. I promise it’ll be fine. Don’t you trust me?”

His eyes stopped flicking around and came to rest on mine. He had asked me that same question not long ago, and I had said no. I held my breath, the rushing of my heartbeat in my ears like the sound of the waterfall at the summer lake.

Oren’s grip on the knife shifted once more, another flash of silver in the moonlight. Blade down. Killing stance. But before I could step back, his lashes lowered for half a second and he flipped the knife down so that he held it by the blade, arm outstretched. Offering it to me.

I let out the breath I was holding, taking the knife with a shaking hand. “Thanks. I’m glad you came. I wanted to find a way to—”

Before I could finish, Tomas leapt, his body crashing into Oren’s and tackling it to the ground. Oren landed with a grunt of pain, chin hitting the ground with a dull crack.

“What are you doing?” I shrieked. I threw myself forward, reaching for Tomas to try and pull him off of Oren’s struggling form. He lifted an arm to shove me back, and the blade of the knife caught him low across his shoulder. He hissed with pain, but didn’t let go of Oren.

I stared at the line of red bisecting Tomas’ arm. “I’m sorry—I—”

“Grab her, will you?” shouted Tomas, now helped by two other scouts to try and pin Oren to the ground.

I felt arms catch hold of me, my feet leaving the ground as I instinctively tried to get back to Oren’s side. The knife fell from nerveless hands to the ground.

I could only watch as they wrestled him to a cage in the center of the square, one I’d always assumed was for livestock. Its iron bars were clearly crafted from frozen wood, immutable and solid.
You can’t magic iron.

Once the door of the cage slid shut, they released me. I slumped to the ground, spent. Oren threw himself at the bars of the cage and the whole thing trembled. I broke free from my captors for half a second, bolting toward Oren until Tomas stepped in between us. The scouts caught up with me, strong hands wrapping around my arms again.

“Don’t,” he warned, clasping his arm with his hand as his sleeve dripped red. “He’s dangerous.”

“Only because you attacked him and
threw him in a cage
!” I snarled.

“We attacked him because he’s a monster!” Tomas shouted back, his breathing audible through his nose as he battled pain and anger. “He’s one of
Them
.”

“What?” My voice didn’t even sound like mine. It sounded like a recording of my voice, twisted and played back on itself. “No, I traveled with him for a week. He saved my life. He
fought
them.”

As I spoke, Tomas let go of the wound on his arm to hand the cage’s key to one of the other scouts. From his boot he withdrew one of the long, slender glass rods that each of the scouts carried—the rod which Tansy used when she found me in the perimeter of the Wood. He approached the cage warily, as if expecting Oren to lash out at him. Instead Oren pressed himself against the back of the cage, eyes darting from the tip of the rod, to Tomas, to my face.

There his gaze held, and while he was distracted, Tomas darted forward and touched the tip of the rod to Oren’s arm. My ears rang with silence, a thunderclap in reverse. I shook my head to clear it, and when I looked at the cage again, Oren was gone. In his place—

It snarled, hurling itself at the bars standing between it and Tomas. Tomas looked at me, mouth open to drive home his point, but when he saw my face, he fell silent.

The thing was as hideous as any of the beasts, its skin a sickly gray, traced all over with veins running black. Its bright, wet lips drew back to reveal a row of pointed teeth, mouth flecked with foam as it raged against its confinement. The colorless eyes stared all around, darting this way and that, seeking some structural weakness in the cage. The clothes were the same, only now I could see the tracery of veins in the skin through the thinly worn fabric of his shirt. The multicolored, patched pants were hideously out of place on its body.

“I’m sorry, Lark,” said Tomas, reaching for my hand. I didn’t resist, my bones all but turned to water. “Come on, I’ll take you home.”

•  •  •

Tomas turned me over to Tansy’s parents. Their attempts to comfort me were fuzzy at best in my mind, the night passing in a haze of refused comfort, biscuits, fruit. Tansy’s mother pressed a mug of tea into my hand after adding something from a blue bottle among her wares.
It’ll help you sleep
, she said. I pretended to drink it, setting it aside.

When Tansy came home, full of news and rumor about what had happened, I tried to feign sleep to avoid her. She was all too gleeful to know about my experiences with “one of Them,” asking things like, “Wow, and you never knew he was a monster?” and “To think you slept right next to him and he could have woken up and
eaten
you!” She told me I was terribly brave to have lived alongside
Them
for so long. Her amazement was typically childlike. Another day, I would have loved to hear her speak of me as brave—but now I could only see that animal snarl, superimposed over the fierceness of Oren’s features.

Only once did I attempt to lift myself from my haze of misery long enough to ask, “What will they do to him?”

“Oh, don’t worry,” said Tansy. “They’ll take care of it. We scouts are trained to do it.”

There was a deadly finality to those last two words. I swallowed, my mouth dry and my voice cracking. “Do what?”

“Execute Them.” Her childish directness turned my blood cold.

Eventually I feigned weariness, Tansy and her family all too willing to believe that whatever had been in that blue bottle had put me to sleep. It was only once the three of them were asleep that my mind began to work again, shuddering to life like an ancient, overgrown machine.

I slipped out of my blankets. I pulled on Tansy’s heavy coat by the door and lifted the latch to let myself out.

There were scouts posted around the square. If I had thought at all, I would have expected them, but my mind still wasn’t functioning very well. So I went up to the nearest, a silent gray form leaning against the corner of a house, and touched his elbow. He started and blinked at me. It was the same scout Tomas had handed the key to Oren’s cage.

“What?” His voice was rough and hoarse. He swallowed and tried again. “What?”

“I’d—like to see him,” I whispered.

“Sorry,” he said, rubbing at his eyes. “Orders.”

“He was my friend,” I said. Though my voice wobbled as if with unshed tears, my eyes were dry and cold. “Please, I just want to say good-bye.”

He glanced across the square at the other guards, indecision written clearly across his face even in the gloom. “I don’t know,” he said, glancing at the cage, which was dark and silent now.

“I won’t tell anyone you were sleeping,” I said, raising an eyebrow.

He swallowed again. “Just don’t get too close, okay?” He gave a light, piercing whistle, two short sounds and a long one. Across the square I saw other scouts’ heads lift, and then relax again as I stepped out of the shadows of the houses and into the square, lit meagerly by what moonlight filtered through the iron leaves overhead.

I walked slowly, and although I probably should have been afraid, my heart was slow and still in my breast. I came to a halt a few paces from the cage. I had thought the thing might be sleeping, for how still it was, but I saw the glitter of white eyes and knew it was awake and watching me.

There was almost nothing in that face of the boy I’d known, the malicious gleam of teeth and the powerful jaws. And yet, somewhere in the white eyes was a wild fierceness that had once so captivated me.

What was it Dorian had said? That I leaked magic, constantly, in an aura around me that any magic-starved creature could tap? Magic cured them, after all. No, not cured. Oren’s voice came flooding into my mind.
All the magic does is disarm them for a time.

I took a step forward, searching those flat, white eyes for that hint of compassion I’d learned to see in Oren’s. With no warning, the Oren-creature leapt at the bars, jaws snapping inches from my face. I fell back, barely stopping myself from letting out a cry. Behind me I heard the scout start to scramble forward, and I lifted a hand. I was all right. Just caught off-guard.

I waited. Dorian had said what Kris told me was true: the magic was leaving me in drips and dribbles, stolen in tiny pieces by Nix and Oren, forced out in great torrents when I drew on it to save myself. There was still something in me, though. I could feel it lurking at the pit of my stomach, and I willed it to stir.

Nix had been pilfering it this whole time. And, apparently, so had Oren, in order to keep himself human—but he hadn’t realized it. I thought of every time we touched, the jolt that passed between us, how his confusion cleared when I touched him.
Most of them don’t even know they’re monsters
, Tansy’s voice came unbidden. I thought of the shadow woman’s confused despair, by the summer lake, the pain at having lost her child even if she couldn’t quite remember how it had happened. How the shadow child’s scream had sounded so human, so very human, as it fell. . . .